


Need You Now

by aster_risk



Series: Sinners [3]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Alternate Universe, Barns Courtney - sorry for stealing your lyrics for my titles, F/M, I'm a sucker for happy endings, Porn With Plot, Sinners Trilogy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-14
Updated: 2018-08-14
Packaged: 2019-06-27 13:27:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15686343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aster_risk/pseuds/aster_risk
Summary: Mulder and Scully finally go on that first date I promised. An uplifting second chance, twelve years after the night they met.Final installment of the 'Sinners' universe.





	Need You Now

“Where did you meet this ‘Fox Mulder’ anyway, darling?” Maggie Scully perches on her daughter’s bed, watching her wiggle a pair of pearls into her ears. In a slate grey pencil skirt and a soft green blouse gifted to her by Bill last Christmas, Scully could be dressed for work—a fact that her mother didn’t hesitate to point out when she arrived. She cuts an intimidating figure, and she knows it.

 

Her wardrobe is a wall of business casual suits that filter out unwanted men. She fought for too many years to escape the shadow of a man, first of Daniel, then of her male colleagues at Sacred Heart, then of men at  _her_ medical practice, and the worst—the laundry list of men who judged her for raising her son alone. So, Dana Scully carries hard-earned power in her pocket and walks like she has somewhere important to be. A man who can’t handle an independent, professional woman is not a man she wants in her life.

 

Fox Mulder doesn’t strike her as that kind of man; still, she slips into black pumps and a swaying trenchcoat to sharpen her figure like a knife block.

 

“Dana? Are you listening to me?”

 

“Hmm?” Scully twists her head to catch her mother’s eye as she fastens the tiny cross around her neck.

 

“Who is Fox Mulder, and how on Earth do you know him? I haven’t seen you this cross-eyed since you were a girl.” Maggie smiles pensively—knowingly, as if she’s predicting a future Scully can only imagine.

 

“I met him at a dive bar,” she says with a shrug. “He works out of a small sector of the FBI called the X Files department. We’ve never crossed paths there; it was just a coincidence we met the other night. Serendipity.” She could never tell Maggie of the affair. It’s not the type of overwhelming secret one confides in one’s mother; instead, a pricking guilt lingers in her chest. She feels perhaps  _guiltier_  because she doesn’t regret a thing. The knowledge that she slept with him while married (however unhappily) to Daniel stings her occasionally, like dancing between fire ants on a trail. She knows Maggie would be disappointed that she would dishonor a commitment, but she refuses to carry that disappointment.

 

“You speak so highly of him; I can’t help but be excited for you.”

 

Scully smiles, wide and open-mouthed like she never used to. “I know. I feel that too—but I should warn you, he’s… odd. Charmingly odd, but if you meet him, please don’t expect a measured, practical Daniel-type man.”

 

“Dana, you don’t want or need another Daniel in your life. And William doesn’t need a man like that in his life either.”

 

That’s another catch, another kink in her romantic life. William comes first. She’ll never date a man who doesn’t wholeheartedly respect and appreciate her son. If William’s child-instincts—the instincts that build elaborate Lego fortresses and collect insects in cloth-covered jars to catalogue and observe—dislike a stranger, that stranger has something to answer for. She may choose the man she brings home, but William chooses whether he stays.

 

“No, you’re right. I just… I have a good feeling about Mulder, and I don’t want his quirks to dictate your first impression of him.” She turns in the mirror, examining her figure.

 

“You look lovely, Dana,” Maggie assures her. She stands up from the bed and rests a hand on her daughter’s shoulder.

 

“Thank you.” A tiny half-smile cracks her lips, the kind her mother can’t read. She slings her purse over her shoulder and strides down the hallway, smoothing the wrinkles in her skirt. Her heels clip the wooden floor.

 

“Ohhhhh,” Will’s high-pitched voice rises from the kitchen at her approach. “Mommy’s wearing her nice shoes.” Scully always found it endearing that Will can discern the sound of her footsteps in her work shoes and the shining heels she reserves for an evening out. “You’re going out fancy tonight,” Will states from his chair at the kitchen table, a spoonful of pasta and red sauce dangling precariously from his fist. His eyes move up to her face, analyzing her outfit to figure out where she might be going.

 

“You look pretty,” he says, and Scully’s heart swells. At the end of the day, Will’s opinion is the only one that matters beyond her own. He cocks his head. “Are you going on a date?” He doesn’t know what the word ‘date’ means, per say, but he knows it’s a special occasion.  _Christmas for grown-ups_ , he called it once, because it rarely happens, and it’s a food-filled night worth dressing up for. The comparison had her doubled over in laughter.

 

Now, Scully bends over to kiss the top of his head. “Yes, I am,” she says. He gazes up at her with round, toffee-brown eyes.  _He has stars in his eyes,_  said the nurse when she handed him to her. A single cell sprung into trillions, into thrumming hearts and vocal chords that railed against a brave new world, pooled eyes that saw first the glare of fluorescent hospital lights. People are grown and born like galaxies.

 

“Be good for Grandma,” she tells him, ruffling his russet hair. “Do your math homework.”

 

He sticks out his lower lip in a begging pout. “Do I  _have_  to?”

 

“Yep. Math is important, honey. How do you think NASA built rockets? If you want to go to Mars, you have to do your math.”

 

Will sighs loudly and takes a bite of his soup. “Fiiiiiine,” he whines, but she can tell by the tone of his voice that he’s willing to placate her tonight. Yesterday, homework was a battle, but he’ll behave for Maggie because she’s too sweet to make him. “Can I watch TV if I finish my homework?”

 

“Only until nine o’clock,” she concedes. It is a special occasion, after all. His mother’s absence, on a fascinating and mysterious  _date_ leaves Will buzzing with a joy he doesn’t understand.

 

Her eyes flick to Will’s crayon-drawn spaceship taped to the kitchen wall. Next to it, the NASA logo scribbled on lined paper. She’s always appreciated the reliability of numbers. Numbers reach like cobwebs to the outer corners of the universe. Numbers and patterns are the framework through which God creates. From this skeleton, nature builds out. Builds itself, builds us.

 

She’s struck with an image of Mulder in the Reston pub. Not the weary Mulder she met the other day, but a soft-lipped, lanky Fox Mulder who listened to her bemoan her sour marriage minutes after learning her name.  _Do you believe in the existence of extraterrestrials?_  he asked her once, sipping from a beer bottle and loosening an ugly tie.

 

She thinks of the first sonogram of her son. Fast-hearted, unearthly little creature churning out an aqueous existence in her womb.

 

She thinks of Daniel Waterson, digging his boots into an earth he resents. The last time she saw him, he downed bourbon like antiseptic for his insides and carried his box of medical journals from their house as the night sky swayed before him.

 

Maybe they’re all extra-terrestrial, to some extent. Why beg for proof of alien life when something so ominous and unearthly lurks within man?

 

She calls over her shoulder, “I love you, Will.” He is too engrossed in his pasta and coloring book to answer, or maybe the door closes before he hears her. For too long, she stops, wondering which.

 

* * * * *

 

“That’s not why I opened the X files,” Mulder informs her over a stylish hamburger. “I don’t search for proof of extraterrestrial life because I find Earth overwhelmingly boring.”

 

Scully shrugs and snatches a French fry off the platter, swiping it through three different sauces.  “It was just a question. Why  _do_  you work on the X files? And don’t just tell me ‘the truth is still out there.’”

 

“You mixed the dipping sauces, Scully.” Mulder wiggles an accusatory fry in her direction. “And to answer your  _just a question,_  I believe the government has covered up proof of alien life for decades, since the Roswell experiments, and I intend to uncover that proof.”

 

“Ah.” Scully eyes him over the rim of her beer. “A whistleblower.”

 

“The world deserves answers, to Sasquatch tracks and lake monster sightings. We deserve to know what happens to the abductees who vanish every year in blinding white light, pulled into an unidentifiable craft, never to be seen again. And the witnesses who want to know who—what—stole their loved ones deserve more than to be mocked by a community that can’t open its mind.”

 

Scully arches her eyebrows. She didn’t expect to open such a deep can of worms. She hasn’t decided whether she admires Mulder’s tenacious defense of the X Files or feels slightly unnerved by it. Maybe both. But he does have a point: if Will vanished in a flash of light and the whir of an unidentified craft, wouldn’t she move Heaven and Earth to find him?

 

“You speak from experience?” she dares to ask.

 

Surprisingly—she didn’t peg him as someone willing to dredge up his family history on a first date—he nods. “My sister, Samantha.” His voice softens. “She was seven years old.”

 

“Did you ever find out—”

 

“She’s dead,” he finishes, and that’s the end of the subject. “But no, I don’t know what happened to her before she died. Maybe it was a UFO I saw that day; perhaps it was government technology. But she was ripped from our lives and used as a test subject in a larger plan.”

 

 _Man playing God,_  Scully muses. Stealing what Nature bred and mutating it, against its will. Sometimes for the better, sometimes to ruin. At its worst, genetic tampering births the most sinister forms of scientific innovation.

 

 _We are all extraterrestrial,_  she wonders again,  _or we will be someday._

 

“I’m sorry for your sister,” Scully says gravely. “I can’t imagine how it would feel to lose my sister.”

 

“All I can do is bring her killers to light,” he says, “and maybe shine a fresh spotlight into the dark corners of this planet.”

 

Scully dips her head in ascent, an acknowledgement that the tense hush of mourning has passed. “What do you see out there, lurking in the woods?” There’s something undeniably exciting about Mulder’s work; it taps into her scientific curiosity, but also the side of her that grew up capturing frogs in a bucket and examining the unique spots on their backs. The X Files spark a curiosity that never left her, a childlike desire to get to the bottom of everything.

 

Mulder smirks. “Oh, a whole host of unexplained phenomena. Killer cockroaches, ghostly figures, you name it.”

 

“You believe in that stuff?” she scoffs.

 

“I’ve seen it, Scully. I’ve met the mothmen.” He charms her with that shit-eating grin.

 

“Well…” Scully offers, “if you’ve seen him, what’s left for you prove? Why stick around—and don’t tell me ‘book material.’ I looked you up on Goodreads you could quit now and you’d be selling copies of your last book until you die. So why gather dust as a public servant?” Twenty years ago, she’d never have asked him. She didn’t ask him, because it didn’t matter who he was after she slid out of his bed in the morning. Dana Scully was never one to lay her heart on the line, but now it’s William’s fragile heart and pliable seven-year-old mind she has to look out for. So, she asks him—why peer around corners when you suspect teeth on the other side? After all these years, why chase monsters in the dark?

 

“I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I quit,” Mulder confides. “It’s always been just… me and the X Files. I don’t know who I would be if I wasn’t in that basement.”

 

From the time he was a child, Fox Mulder’s entire life has been buried in the X Files, Scully realizes. It’s his constant, the one thing for which he can focus, and obsess, and fall. She wonders if he’s ever had an opportunity to fall for something else. She wonders if it was twelve years ago in a dingy bar, with a married woman.

 

“You ever think about just… doing it for fun?” Scully offers him a half-smile, something to let him know she’s accepted that cryptids and UFOs are an integral piece of his heart. “Fuck the bureaucrats; pick up a guidebook and tour some Sasquatch hotspots.”

 

He straightens up, obviously taken aback by her knowledge of ‘hotspots.’

 

“My son,” says Scully with a wide smile, “he’s obsessed with science fiction. It doesn’t go over very well with his classmates, unfortunately.” Her smile turns to a grimace.“Well,” says Mulder, “not all of it is fiction. I may just be ‘Spooky’ to the rest of the Bureau, but I’ve seen some fascinating scientific discoveries. I’ve seen prehistoric insects released from hibernation and the birth of a silicon-based life form. Granted, both organisms tried to kill me, but—” his eyes twinkle teasingly— “all in the name of science, of course.”

 

She feels a modicum of relief that William is not the only boy who’s been teased for relishing in outlandish stories of the final frontier, followed by a wave of guilt for making light of Mulder’s isolation. She suspects, though, that Fox Mulder would get on well with William. Mulder’s boyish, mischievous face betrays his inner child, despite the suit and tie. Since she had William, Scully found the prodding explorer in her heart was slowly reaffirming its presence through her shell, and Mulder’s shameless enthusiasm encourages her.

 

“Last fry, Scully.” He wiggles an extra-long French fry beneath her nose.

 

Scully arches her eyebrow, staring cross-eyed at the limp fry.

 

“C’mon, Scully,” Mulder pouts, prodding her lips. She opens her lips, and Mulder pops the fry into her mouth, salty and soft. He grins, his crow’s feet betraying the years. In that moment, she forgets the tired, cynical man she saved from a humiliating bar fight and remembers the adamant truth-seeker ghostbusting his way through his thirties. The man whose bed she shared before she had the courage to terminate her withering marriage.

 

She stares at him, analyzing. She honestly can’t predict whether Mulder has a place in her life. She thinks Fox Mulder would drown in the X Files until he died, one way or another. She also thinks she can pull him out, just enough, just the waist up. There’s something beautiful about Mulder’s cryptids. The myths themselves imbue nature with an awe it lost with Manifest Destiny, remind people that there’s something breathtaking about the weird and spooky. But she can’t bear to watch Mulder sink like this, receding from the world, trusting no one, not if she wants him to be a part of her life.

 

She wants him, in more ways than one, and she’ll adjust accordingly—but only if he’ll adjust for her in return. For William. They’ll cross that bridge if they get to it.

 

Mulder offers her a bite of his fish and chips, reaching over the table with his fork. She accepts it. “Hey Scully,” he starts, scraping his leftovers into a takeout box, “do you wanna get out of here?”

 

Her meets her eyes momentarily, and she knows the offer could mean anything—sex, a stroll through town, the parting of ways. It is an open invitation into Mulder’s life. From here, the ball rests in her hands.

 

She nods. “Let’s go—your place?”

 

The ball rolls to him. He offers her his arm. She takes it.

 

* * * * *

 

She follows Mulder to his apartment in a five-seat silver Volkswagen that feels wildly inappropriate to the situation. She flashes back to the beer-stained napkin upon which Mulder had once written the address of his apartment building. Mulder has not changed his address in twelve years, and Scully has not forgotten it. She’s almost embarrassed by the clarity with which she remembers their tryst.

 

She remembers feeling jaded outside Mulder’s weather worn front door, craving a cigarette and preparing to cheat on Daniel in a vain attempt to compensate for the last five years of her life. She wonders if Mulder felt the same, or feels it now—once his love affair, the X Files have imprisoned him, and now he betrays their trust for a woman he met in a dive bar.

 

She pauses, as she feeds the parking meter, to stare at that front door. She pauses before she gives herself over to Fox Mulder’s bachelor pad of cryptids and conspiracies, wondering whether she should leave him to her younger self. Does Mulder belong to a jaded, thirty-something Dana Scully, the kind of woman who would throw everything aside for a little adventure and find a brooding man’s living room alluring? Are they still compatible  _sexually,_  for God’s sake? Will she regret sleeping with him—something that wouldn’t have stopped her twelve years ago—or worse, will she regret falling for him down the line?

 

She pictures his face, lined and sweet as it had become. He has stars in his eyes. She sighs through her nose and punches in the code he entrusted her, letting herself into his building.

 

Mulder opens the door before she can knock. He takes her coat and hangs it over the doorknob. Glancing around his apartment, Scully is taken aback to find a worn-but-classy leather sofa and a rocking chair, among other furnishings. His home grew up with him, to say the least. His kitchen looks like he cooks in it, and his cabinets like they house a variety of foodstuffs. He’s cleaned for her, clearly, because UFO posters reading  _I want to believe_  and  _The truth is out there_  in corny block letters still hang crookedly from their respective walls. It feels homey, softer and better taken care of than it did twelve years ago. Maybe the books he’s writing have something to do with it. Maybe they’ve just gotten old.

 

He wears a t-shirt tucked into faded jeans. His hair hangs into his face. He is a relic of the era of photographs taped to walls and ominous green text ticked into computer screens. It created him. Now, though, he holds up a Redbox DVD of Dead Man’s Chest as if it’s not the middle of a three-part story. He adapts.

 

Scully allows him to lead her inside. She accepts the bottle of beer he offers her, popping the tab on his side table. She curls against his chest on the couch, shrugs into him like an oversized sweatshirt. She relinquishes something, then. A spring pops from her chest, and she feels looser in her joints than she has in years.

 

Time ripples and pools at her feet. Vessels sway across her vision, Jolly Rodgers and squirming creatures of the deep. She sees a borrowed ship, alone against an empty horizon. A frenzied jackass at the wheel and a woman along for the ride, who’s about to be elected the queen of rebels and thieves. Even now, Mulder taps into her dormant sense of adventure. Mulder is watching her lips, watching her tongue slide discreetly over them. When she looks him in the eye, hopes he isn’t watching her through the sunrise on the TV. When she grips the hem of his t-shirt, she hopes he sees her wrinkles and the tiny mole above her lip. She cannot be Mulder’s escapist fantasy, any more than Mulder can be hers, and when she kisses him she hopes he knows that.

 

He takes her cheeks in his hands, runs his thumbs over her eyelids. “Scully…” he takes her name like a one-bite dessert, low in his throat. She can get used to hearing her surname in bed, in Mulder’s husky growl. It rolls off his tongue sultrier than ‘Dana’ ever has. She pushes him back into the couch cushions and nibbles on his plump bottom lip, clutching his shirt in tight fists.

 

“Scully,” he says again, breaking the kiss with an audible pop. His cheeks tint scarlet, and from where she’s situated against him, she can feel his cock rock hard beneath her thigh. “The movie—”

 

“Fuck the movie.” The dimly lit apartment around her, the man in her arms, are more important than the adventure on screen.

 

He pushes himself into an upright position on the couch. “What do you—I mean—how far do you want to take this, Scully?”

 

She smirks and wiggles her eyebrows, hoping he’ll get the message. “Take me to the stars and beyond,” she dares. “Fuck me, Mulder,” in case he didn’t get it the first time.

 

He shoots her a wide Cheshire grin. “If you say so, Dr. Scully.” He pulls her over his lap, so she straddles him between her thighs, knees digging into the couch cushions. His hand slips up her shirt, fingertips brushing over her ass-cheek and up the dip of her spine, leaving goosebumps in their wake. She unbuttons the blouse in the front, pinching the buttons one-handed as she plays with his ruffled hair.

 

He presses his lips to her neck, down her collar bones, to her breasts as her blouse falls to the floor. He doesn’t bother to unhook her bra, just tugs the cups down over her ribs, slips the straps off her freckled shoulders and takes her nipple between his teeth, rolling and nipping and pinching her in kiss-swollen lips.

 

He makes quick work of her restrictive pencil skirt, his jeans, the layers of pantyhose and boxer-briefs between them. She doesn’t consider the disorganized pile of clothing on his floor, or the nightmare of gathering up her belongings when she leaves, especially not as Mulder’s fingers dip between her thighs and find her slick and hot. His thumb grazes her clit, and she inhales sharply. A breathy, high-pitched sound flits from her chest. “Yes, Mulder,” she keens, “right there.” He rolls two fingers around her clit in slow circles, then dips them into her pussy. His eyes are fixed on the flush of her cheeks, the way she tosses back her head and moans. Her chest vibrates against him like a boom box, begging to cry out in ecstasy but still holding back.

 

She finally does cry out when he fetches a condom and a bottle of lube from the side table and pushes into her folds. She lets him hover at her entrance, sliding the tip of his cock along her folds, teasing, stroking her own clit with a feather-light touch as Mulder adjust a grip on her hips. She squeezes her eyes shut and whimpers his name. “Mulder, I need you. I need you in me now,” drawing out the final word with a needy croon.

 

He thrusts into her, then draws himself back out, adjusting her on his lap. She wiggles forward with a knowing smirk. She sinks onto the length of him, and  _Jesus, was it this good before?_  Did she savor the feeling of him moving inside her, pushing back against her open hips? She doesn’t remember the specific sensation of sex in their youth, and she thinks it’s better that way.

 

She rides him faster, pushing him into the pillows, praying his couch has held up to rougher nights. She syncs her breaths to his, listening to the spill of oxygen into the space between them, sitting up and falling frantically onto his cock to the rhythm of their too-old-for-this lungs.

 

“Shit, Scully, you’re so— you’re so—” He grunts, clinging to her willowy frame, naked and untied above him. She listens to him try to form words. “You’re so incredible,” finally tumbles his lips, followed by a desperate, “Jesus fucking Christ, Scully,” as he comes. Her own orgasm builds, tipping, teetering on the edge as Mulder pulls out. She settles uncomfortably beside him, but oh— _oh,_  his expert hands return to her clit as soon as they’ve disposed of the condom, and he traces frantic figure eights over her folds. His fingers glisten. He only gets quicker; his focus zeroes in on her clit until finally, a shudder racks her body. She lets her jaw, her heart, every muscle in her body go slack and still momentarily as the best orgasm she’s had in over a decade sizzles through her torso.

 

She collapses across his legs, both of them as naked and jelly-limbed as dolls posed for a portrait. Tilting her shoulders, she gazes up at Mulder’s sex-sweetened face. He winks. She rolls her eyes spectacularly. They don’t sleep. Time ripples and pools—she cannot say how long she laid with him when she finally gets to her feet and begins to scour the floor for her clothing.

 

Mulder’s eyes linger on her peaked breasts as she bends to put on her stockings. “Can you stay?” he asks her. She remembers this question. What a dangerous question, opening a labyrinth of doorways to pass and windows out which to climb.

 

“Not tonight.” She does not betray her own disappointment on the matter. “My mother can’t stay the night with Will. She has church in the morning, outside of town.” She pauses, buttoning her shirt. “Call me in the morning, though. You have my number. We can find time to go out for a coffee, don’t you think?”

 

A true spectacle, Mulder sprawls naked and beaming on the sofa. The television casts him in a weird, pleasant glow. “This time can I wait for you?” he asks playfully, eyes sparkling in the lamplight.

 

The little voice inside her head— _Maybe we’re all extraterrestrials._

 

Mulder, young— _But what about God?_

 

White-haired maternity nurse, 5:03 AM— _He has stars in his eyes._

 

Mulder, now, pressing more urgently— “Scully?”

 

On the TV, a beating heart drowns in a jar of sand. A pirate drinks himself to sleep. Scully’s eyes crinkle when she smiles. “Wait for me.”

**Author's Note:**

> It is done. This one-shot that turned into a monstrosity of an AU is finally finished. Don't get me wrong—I'm glad I made a trilogy out of it, but part one will always be my favorite. An onslaught of real-world problems made this project very difficult to complete.


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